MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IAM not attracted by people who dislike the B.B.C. There is the type of person who considers it distinguished to remain immune to a form of entertainment or instruction which the vulgar also enjoy. There is the even more outrageous type of person who either listens in fury to his neighbour's wireless (as if one could read a book by peeping over someone else's shoulder in the under- ground) or else turns his own machine on listlessly and in the secret hope that it will emit sounds which he will much dislike. I regard the man who says he never listens to the wireless as conceited: I regard the man who never bothers to consult the programme, and then complains that he never gets what he wants, as a lazy and feckless individual of slovenly mental habits. It is as though one were to dash up to a bookstall at a railway station, snatch the first book or magazine which came to one's hand, and complain thereafter that the N.P.A., the N.U.J. and the whole publishing trade devoted their efforts to producing printed material suited only for children under ten. The selective listener, if he takes the trouble to read and mark the Radio Times, will find that every day there are two or three hours on the programme which will provide him with pleasure, entertainment, instruction or relaxation. If he be fortunate enough to live in one of those rare and favoured air-pockets which enable him to receive the Third programme he will be privileged to hear many items of very high quality. If he be fortunate enough to possess a television set, he will find that for ten minutes or so in the evening he will be able to watch in comfort a quite interesting news feature or on occasions to be told entrancing stories by old gentlemen who sit mouthing there in front of his armchair. The wireless is a magnificent invention ; all those who either ignore the thing or merely fiddle with it indolently are excluding themselves from an important modern experience and wilfully denying them- selves an easy and pleasant expansion of the mind.
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During the last week I have, whenever possible, been following with awed fascination the journey of Mr. Wynford Vaughan Thomas round the world. I have much enjoyed these broadcasts. The technical skill with which his panting words have been conveyed to us across the oceans, the masterly manner in which Mr. John Snagge has tended his distraught colleague, the zest which the sleepless Mr. Thomas has himself thrown into his breathless messages, have filled me with sympathy and respect. It was a delight to hear this virile voice reaching us from the Antipcides and to note the atmospherics which caused the words of Mr. Thomas to advance towards us and then to recede, like the long wash of Australasian seas. There were moments when anxiety intervened; anxiety lest Mr. Thomas, in his desire to be polite to his hosts and serviceable to the general listener, might miss his plane ; that he might, poor man, oversleep ; that something might go wrong ; that he might get inextricably entangled in the international date-line ; that he might find nothing to say. All those of us who have flown far or high are aware that, although the body may be brought to Honolulu, the brain somehow has been left behind at Karachi. Every time that I have flown any long distance I have reached my destination with the feeling that the accustomed contents of my head have been replaced by an empty cardboard box, similar to that in which, in the early days of the Second World War, one kept one's gas-mask. It was a remarkable feat on the part of Mr. Vaughan Thomas to fly across the three oceans and yet to remain for ever on the spot. How did he manage, with all those varied and successive voices chattering in his deafened ear-drums, to retain his own ?
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Behind it all was the romance of long distances rapidly traversed. How dull and dulled must be the imagination of those who, in following the giant strides with which Mr. Thomas crossed the world, experienced no tingling of excitement, no stirring of imaginative delight! The beauty of winged beings must clutch the heart at moments, as when Iris, " skimming the mountain peaks," swooped down from Olympus, or Hermes with his fluttering sandals sped over the Aegean. The unseen movements of our earth, turning its mountains to the rising sun, its deserts and oceans to the stars, became suddenly implicit for us in the sounds and words which came froTn the familiar box in the familiar room. It was 9.20 p.m. for John Snagge at Broadcasting House in Langham Place on Friday, September 23rd, but for Vaughan Thomas at Sydney it was 6.3o a.m. tomorrow, or was it yesterday, or was it two days hence ? There was the contrast also between the confined intimacy of the aeroplane itself and the limitless impersonality of the wide areas over which it passed. No man can fly for any distance without being perturbed by this amazing contrast between the familiar and the unknown, this strange dislocation of time and space. There is the little cabin with its twin rows of lights, the same chair in which one had settled as the machine bumped along the tarmac at Heath Row, the rack with its copy of a London newspaper, and the muffler one had bought last November, and there sliding below one the dim bends of the , Nile, the successive flashes as the moon catches the irrigation channels, the mountains of southern Persia crinkling in the morning sun, the dark or shining patches of the sea. And somewhere on the dim plateau of the earth men and women are moving or sleeping, to whom one's own so personal adventure is no more than a drone in the sky.
For many of us, moreover, Mr. Vaughan Thomas's dramatic " Round the World in Eight Days " will have recalled our boyhood passion for that admirable writer, Monsieur Jules Verne. I could with luck have met Monsieur Jules Verne, since he only died in 1905. I should have liked to assure him of the deep debt that I owed to his books, since they were among the first stories that taught me to read with pleasure to myself. I have often remarked upon the vanity of cultured people, who refuse to admit that the books which influenced them in childhood were not the masterpieces of literature which they assert, but those which introduced them to the habit of sweet, silent reading. I see no shame in admitting that the first work of literature which consciously affected me was a revolting story entitled The Angel of Love which my mother read aloud to me when I was five or six. But the first book which I read to myself with any easy enjoyment was Jules Verne's De la Terre a la Lune. It was the story of how a group of people (and their indi- viduality and character remain vague to me) were shot out of a cannon towards the moon. They made the journey in an enormous shell, the interior of which was richly quilted or, capitonne, and of which, in my copy, there was an illustration which filled me with fear and wonder. Once the obus had passed out of the earth's atmosphere the objects which they discarded refused to obey the laws of gravitation and accompanied them on their way. There was, I remember, a dead dog, which remained suspended beside the projectile in the semblance of a hearth-rug. I was deeply impressed by this picture, and my affection for the moon book was such that I was unable to appreciate with equal fervour Monsieur Verne's more popular Round the World in Eighty Days. To this hour I do not regard the hero, Mr. Phileas Fogg of the Reform Club, as a person with whom I should really like to dine. Unlike Mr. Wynford Vaughan Thomas, he lacked charm.
If Monsieur Jules Verne were alive today he would be one hundred and twenty-one years old, so that it is perhaps otiose to regret that he has been precluded from listening to Mr. Thomas's recapitulation of his famous story. I have a suspicion that he would have been displeased. No writer really enjoys his visions becoming realities before his eyes, no prophet really relishes his prophecies coming true ; it makes them feel back-numbers ; it makes them date. It was a wonderful thing in 1865 to foretell the coming of television, aeroplanes and submarines. But such is the forgetfulness of human beings that the glamour of a prophecy becomes tarnished once it is fulfilled. So that I am glad that Monsieur Jules Verne, for whom I have much affection and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, is (I hope) sleeping peacefully in the cemetery at Amiens.
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